Who’ll cull the dead dog now…?
Who’ll cull the dead dog…? Well, that’s a no-brainer
In so far as it concerns us — and it doesn’t a bit, that’s plain,
Believe us. So, who’ll cull the rotting beast, you say…?
None of us, we hope, pillars of good standing.
We don’t love the weakening of the standards;
On the contrary, actually we are
For the strengthening of the disentanglements.
Maintain us please torn apart, thus we prefer
By much. And we demand that nobody tamper
With the hints we’ve afforded so far to all and sundry.
And now temper you bile, be not so somber.
The story is too easy to comprehend, easier still
To recount. The guest’s afghan growled,
And barked and whined too loudly by half
The whole damned day. Made us almost insane,
And uncherishable — quite the contrary from the product
Of our disposition in any state of normalcy.
And we became aglow with the insistence
Of such harsh irritation, we swear, pardi.
Believe us, all told, we are reasonably sad.
For where is instead the pithy thrill now
Of hearing the wretched fatling rot
At the bottom of the abandoned well…?
It plummeted into the void,
Into the hairy abyss of the relinquished pit — its lip, its lid,
It tried on a whim to sniff at and probably urinate on.
Unaided, we swear, it must have slipped over the rim.
It alighted with such a sickening thud,
As the saying goes. Such disappearances,
We acknowledge, are heartrending, and so on,
But we are not culling the damned carcass, no sir,
No way, nor we; we have standings, we have
Standards, we’ve turned into a virtue the habit
Of cool disentanglement, you see…?
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[From Catland Gish. The Cats.]
